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In the End, a Painful Choice
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"The president strongly encouraged NDI to enhance its efforts," he said.
"It was very friendly," he repeated.
And the tribal program?
"The issue of working in certain parts of the country did come up, and he said, 'Let's discuss this issue when we have more time, in Sanaa.' He wasn't hostile at all. He just wanted more time to talk about it."
That, Wollack said, was the extent of the conversation. Time was up, and he and NDI's chairman, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, left so Saleh could move on to whatever was next on his schedule.
Which turned out to be a stroll among Washington's monuments.
Followed by lunch in Georgetown, a little shopping and a doctor's visit.
And then he headed home.
Home: where portraits of His Excellency Ali Abdullah Saleh, leader of Yemen for 27 years and recipient in the last election of 96.3 percent of the vote, are everywhere. In stores. In restaurants.
On billboards, such as the one announcing the $100 million mosque Saleh is building near his main palace. On banners attached to streetlights, some of which work, most of which don't. In the dens of private homes, where Yemenis gather every afternoon to chew the leaves of a narcotic plant called khat and talk about Yemen's chaotic politics and increasing deterioration. And in hotels with blast walls like the one where Robin Madrid, NDI's Yemen director, was talking to Les Campbell, her Washington-based supervisor, about the chances that Saleh would meet with them.
"It could be any moment," Campbell, who oversees operations in 13 countries in the Middle East for NDI, said, "or it could be no moment."
It was Dec. 3, NDI's tribal democracy program was down to its last 12 days, and Campbell wanted to continue the conversation from Washington before time ran out. The program, funded for six months and with $300,000 by the U.S. government as part of its foreign policy of promoting democracy to combat terrorism, was designed to research and help solve some of the tribal conflicts that have destabilized a part of Yemen that the United States suspects is a terrorist refuge. As the six months had gone by, however, Saleh had made it increasingly clear he was against a program that would teach two dozen tribal sheiks, in control of about 25,000 armed fighters, how to get along, even if the aim was to bring peace and development to one of the most ignored parts of the world.
